Posted
by
timothy
on Friday July 23, 2010 @09:16PM
from the hard-experiment-to-re-run dept.

thecarchik writes "Preliminary data seemed to show that hybrids were more likely to be involved in pedestrian crashes or hit cyclists. But now EV enthusiast Mark Larson (he's also an Emeritus Professor of Spanish at Utah State University) has analyzed some additional data and found this not to be the case at all. He used 1994-2008 figures from the Fatality Reporting System maintained by the NHTSA and found that the rate of pedestrian fatalities has in fact fallen over that same period."

The only city that I have seen where crossing the street with no regards if there is a car or not seems to be in NYC. Probably do to tougher J-Walking laws... But Even in NY State you go to the smaller Cities such as Albany or Troy... People will just cross the road without any care... I think they figure if you Hit them then they can sue you for a lot of money if they are not killed.

Ugh. Lies, damn lies, and statistics. I don't really care whether EVs are more dangerous to blind pedestrians or not, but this is just bad statistics aimed at producing a desired result. The claim is that electric vehicles will not be more dangerous, because hybrids at low speeds are also quiet and there has been no significant change in pedestrian fatalities.

From that one sentence summary, the fundamental flaw in this study should be apparent.

When my dad taught me to drive he told me to keep my window down (if possible) and listen for the tyre noise of overtaking vehicles. That was 25 years ago when engines were louder now, but it made sense even then. I ride a bike to work and for me tyre noise from cars is much more important than engine noise. You don't get much engine noise from an automatic which has shifted up under low load.

One thing which did happen though was one night we had gone out for dinner. I had left my phone or something in the car so I went back to get it. There was an empty parking space beside our corolla so I opened the drivers side door and started rummaging. Quite suddenly there was this prius right beside me and almost hitting the car door. It had snuck up on me because in slow driving situations you do listen for an engine at idle, and for fan noise, etc. I didn't hear that. The thing was very quiet.

Everything is relative and I think that as electric cars become more common the total amount of noise will decrease. We will become accustomed to the lower overall level of noise. Towns which have signs asking truck drivers to avoid the use of engine brakes will replace those with signs banning the use of regenerative braking. Homeowners will complain about the sound of cruddy AC motor controllers roaring past their houses. Normality will have returned.

When my dad taught me to drive he told me to keep my window down (if possible) and listen for the tyre noise of overtaking vehicles.

If you drive with the window down you'll be hearing wind noise and maybe your own tyres. Also, engines were much noisier back then, so why the hell would you listen for the tyres?

If you want to detect overtaking vehicles then that's what mirrors and your neck are for.

As I said, tyres give you information about a moving vehicle, even if the engine is running slow. Of course you have to use your eyes, but there are situations (especially on my bike) where I want to keep my eyes on the road ahead and I rely on other senses to tell me what is going on around me.

Any driving technique that relies on it being warm or dry enough to keep the window open obviously fails when you need most awareness - when the weather is bad. You need to do things that work all the time. i.e. use you eyes, either directly or via a mirror. Your method is encouraging you into a habit of not looking because you don't hear anything, and is thus not only pointless but dangerous.

I, for one, tend to drive with my window down in the winter when the roads are ugly.

Why?

First, it doesn't get covered in condensation if it's down. I can see through a window that's not present a lot better than one which is covered in a film of water that is rapidly becoming ice. Keeping one window down also clears up the inside of all of the other windows far faster than running the AC compressor to dehumidify things, since the outside air is very dry.

I don't count rain as being adverse. The particular tires, weight distribution, suspension, and general handling of my car mean that it can stop, turn, and accelerate better in a proper downpour than most cars can in the dry.

But even then, the leather is well-conditioned and doesn't mind being a lot wet. The door panels are covered in a rather impervious layer of vinyl with nothing soft or furry to mold or stink. The speakers are plastic and could care less. The electronic gadgetry mounted to the driver

Well, I don' know about driving with the window down on purpose but it is true that at regular driving speeds, say 30 mph and up, you as a pedestrian/cyclist are hearing primarily tire noise and not engine noise. But the comment about parking lots is interesting - I think you are right that fan noise (and perhaps exhaust and engine noise depending on the model) play a key role in sensing an approaching vehicle.

Actually, the whole tire noise comment is interesting. Probably the reason why you don't see that many pedestrian fatalities is because at higher speeds, the tires are going to be making enough noise that people will hear the hybrid, and at slower speeds there may be more accidents but rarely is someone going to get killed.

It's not the only problem with the study. The Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990. It's only very recently that many municipalities have made significant changes to accommodate the blind (and others.) Further, there have been recent changes to cars that make them safer for pedestrians (primarily in Europe, but some of the design changes have come to the US as well.)

Without attempting to correct for these factors, the study is worthless. It can say nothing beyond the fact that fewer blind people have died in traffic fatalities since 1994. (I must admit that I've not had a chance to read this fellow's work, although I did read the original NHTSA study.)

Further, there have been recent changes to cars that make them safer for pedestrians (primarily in Europe, but some of the design changes have come to the US as well.)

As someone with no interest in cars beyond when they almost run over me, I've obviously not paid attention, so could you give a quick summary, or point me in the right direction of what to search for? Googleing "pedestrian safety improvements" wasn't really helpful.

Also the much softer bumpers(you know the ones that break when you back into a shopping cart and cost 3k to replace?), as well as the move to much larger flatter front ends(worse aero but hey it's safer).

Correction, it could say that the issue with hybrids running quieter is a relatively insignificant factor in pedestrian deaths, and if you want to reduce that, then the legislation should perhaps look into more significant factors.

What scientists? OK, the guy is a professor - of spanish. His entire 'study' seems to be 'some cars are now hybrid, and pedestrian deaths went down recently, therefore hybrid cars are not a problem for pedestrians'.

You know, I've seen an increasing trend in that. "Experts" have been coming out with "studies" in fiends. Because they have "Professor" or "Doctor" somewhere near their name, they are immediately presumed to be experts in the field that they are discussing. It rarely takes much research, sometimes just reading the article, to find out that their area of expertise has nothing to do with the topic of the study.

The article does hit both sides of it though, which is good. I couldn't find what he is currently teaching though. He's listed to be an instructor in the USU Art Department. [usu.edu] His USU profile page [usu.edu] doesn't really indicate much. The indicated department doesn't show him as being on the faculty nor staff. [usu.edu]. That would be consistent with the "Emeritus" part of his title. He was a professor. He was in the art department, which doesn't seem to include any language arts.

I did find some rough name matches, so his art field may have been photography. Beyond that, I couldn't find anything about this guy.

So, his credentials went from sounding like an expert in the field, to "Mark Larson, retired art teacher", or more simply "Mark Larson, bored retired guy".

Thanks for that link. I just ran it on my own site. I love the way we think mob rule should run the world. We use it for our government (elections). We use it for our legal system (juries). We even (unfortunately) use it for the news, as cited in the linked article. Who cares what the truth is, and what trained experts in the field have to say about it, it's more fun to let the unwashed masses without all the facts make our decisions. I'm sure the argument of "well, tell them all the f

He's a professor of Spanish, which isn't really a scientist, and is a degree that probably came with a light load of mathematics courses.

He doesn't attempt to correct for any other factors that may have led to a drop in pedestrian fatalities. All he's proven is a very casual correlation.

The original NHTSA has a more credible methodology:

It concluded that hybrids like the Toyota Prius were involved in pedestrian crashes at a rate of 0.9 percent, half again as high as the 0.6 percent rate for gasoline vehicles. Hybrids were also twice as likely to have hit cyclists, at a rate of 0.6 percent versus 0.3 percent.

The main problem with the above is that data on VIN numbers are only available from 12 states.

A lot of googlers drive priuses because of the $3k+ incentive Goggle was giving at the time. Also a lot of Googlers ride bikes with complete disregard of their own, or others, safety. Add to that these bikes are infamous for dropping their chain and hence the only braking system while going downhill at an intersection (they're cheap cruiser bikes).

I don't have any numbers but cyclist/pedestrian meet prius/SUV was quite frequent when I worked there. They even put

Add to that these bikes are infamous for dropping their chain and hence the only braking system while going downhill at an intersection (they're cheap cruiser bikes).

This is completely false, not a single bike made in the past 10+ years has this characteristic. Furthermore, it's illegal [bikelink.com] to ride such a bike in California (reg VC 21201a). Google may be paranoid of safety about it's employees (the famous bus-number [wikimedia.org] comes into play here), but the situation you describe with the bikes is a complete fabrication.

I'm not saying the bikes have no brakes: they are cruiser bikes [wikipedia.org] with a single braking mechanism whis is a coaster brake. That braking system is completely legal, generally considered safe and low maintenance, however the GBikes suffer so much user abuse (they are used a lot, remember, not personal bikes) that the chain do derail quite frequently removing all means of stopping safely. I never said google employees got killed daily because of failing brakes, rather that in this area the bike accidents are qui

Right. The study has no weight. You would have to discount every factor that could cause a decrease in blind pedestrian fatalities that is more significant than the introduction of hybrids... and there's a LOT of more significant factors.

The study and conclusion is so meaningless, it got me wondering about what goes into this, behind the scenes. Is it an academic that has some desire to use ANY sort of data to push the idea that hybrids aren't dangerous? A study funded by somebody with financial inte

These stats have nothing to do with hybrids specifically, but just the trend in traffic fatalities. In my area, and I suspect most others, the percentage of cars that are hybrids would be in the low single digits. Looking at overall traffic fatalities and trying to draw a conclusion about something that is such an insignificant factor is useless.

Preliminary data seemed to show that Al-Qaeda were violent terrorists. But now AQ enthusiast Mark Larson (he's also an Emeritus Professor of Spanish at Utah State University) has analyzed some additional data and found this not be the case at all. He used 1988-2001 crime data from the Uniform Crime Report and found that the murder rate in fact fell over that same period.

How about data analysis by someone who isn't an "enthusiast" and by someone who is qualified?

"...rate of pedestrian fatalities has in fact fallen over that same period" yes, we've been designing pedestrian safe bumpers and hoods in that period, cross walks are safer with better lights and audible warnings.

As someone who was clipped by a Prius in a parking lot when it was on battery, the damned things are quiet as hell and sneak up on you like a ICE powered automobile doesn't.

I don't know if sound is that much of an improvement, what fraction of cars to people look at when they hear one in a parking lot? Pedestrians should be looking both ways before crossing traffic lanes, whether they hear something or not.

It's too bad that we can't expect people to be good drivers, good driving is probably the best safety measure of all.

I hope whatever measure is taken doesn't make EVs annoying. I hate vehicles that have those piercingly loud and high pitched backup sounds.

As someone who was clipped by a Prius in a parking lot when it was on battery, the damned things are quiet as hell and sneak up on you like a ICE powered automobile doesn't.

As someone who is 48 and has typical declining hearing, let me tell you -- pay more attention. I'm not being glib, I'm serious. Hybirds (very popular here) are just your warm-up for an inevitability of age, or simple mis-attention from iPod or cell. Look around you when walking in driving zones. I'm having to do it a lot more than I used to.

And cars are quieter now than twenty-thirty years ago. Watch out for that in stats. The idle of many new cars is just lost in nearby street noise.

Here is my take on this.. First, the noise of the car (or lack of it) doesn't make an accident the pedestrians fault.. and vice versa, the same noise and lack of it doesn't absolve the pedestrian either.. Drivers, noisy car or not, have to watch out for pedestrians as best they can.. and pedestrians (out of self preservation) need to watch out for cars as best they can... So therefore the whole study doesn't mean crap in the real world, and is useless for any practical applications of it's "findings".

As someone who was clipped by a Prius in a parking lot when it was on battery, the damned things are quiet as hell and sneak up on you like a ICE powered automobile doesn't.

Very true - I worked at a place where there were a number of electric vehicles (converted ICE and custom built) running around campus and they easily snuck up on you. Nothing like seeing a completely silent (vs an ICE),full size, van pulling in behind you. You learned to listen for "golf carts" when walking around.

Yep. The best thing you can do is remove your muffler completely. Or get one of those spiffy coffee-can looking exhausts. That way everyone can hear you coming and get out of your way! (Even if they drew the more logical conclusion in the latter case -- that the horrendous noise is a weed-whacker gone mad -- they're still going to get out of the way!)

Let's keep in mind this is a professor emeritus of Spanish. He evidently doesn't know jack about quantitative analysis.

If silent hybrid vehicles posed a threat to pedestrians, he reasoned, then the number of pedestrian deaths should have risen since 2000, when the first hybrids were sold.

Well there's your problem right there. You can't identify the contribution due to hybrids by looking at the total. There are on the order of what, 100 million vehicles on the road, and maybe 1% of them are hybrids. So if pedestrian kills by the other 99% of vehicles drop by 1%, hybrids could be 99 times more deadly than them and you wouldn't notice from this guy's analysis.

Second, Larson really only addresses half the issue. Fatalities from accidents are one data point, but injuries would be another--and are far more common than deaths.

You can't identify the contribution due to hybrids by looking at the total. So if pedestrian kills by the other 99% of vehicles drop by 1%, hybrids could be 99 times more deadly than them and you wouldn't notice from this guy's analysis.

He hasn't asked why there have been fewer pedestrian deaths:

For example, van services for the elderly and disabled may be taking more of the most vulnerable pedestrians off the road.

In the US that's true. In other countries, there are much larger proportions of hybrids.

That's not very accurate. Vast majority of the world doesn't really touch the price ranges where hybrids are, so far. Those parts that do are often happy with compact cars (not many hybrids here yet) or simply diesels. Especially the former kind of places, but also the latter to a large degree - with higher average age of cars. In fact, when trying to quickly find some numbers, I got this [wikipedia.org] - Japan certainly ahead of the U

Assuming he meant qualitative analysis in the field of chemistry, which is the only field I know of that uses that term, qualitative analysis is not more touchy-feely than quantitive analysis. It is a determination of what species are present by a process of elimination and narrowing down until only one possibility remains. Nothing subjective, vague or wishy-washy about it. Just doesn't quantify anything.

In other news my Biology teacher thinks that Beowulf is a Shakespearean play. Something tells me that a Spanish teacher isn't an expert on analyzing statistics, hence why he teaches Spanish, not math or science.

It's not a problem with the cars, it's with dumbshits who don't look where they fucking walk. I ride a bicycle everywhere and it makes zero noise even when freewheeling, not that it matters I can ding my bell til my thumb falls off and many won't hear it because of the ipod craze.

People step out on the road in front of me all the time, maybe not realizing the speed I'm moving at when they last looked up the road, but it's still their fault. There are two ways to deal with this problem: Screaming at the top of your lungs at pedestrians "get of da focken road jackass!" or alternatively, pedestrians can take responsibility for their own personal safety and look with their fucking eyeballs.

As I use my bicycle to go to work, I have the same problem as you : pedestrian being idiot (and i would note , car thinking they have a priority over cyclist , no respecting right of passage but that's for another slashdot story). But those damn hybrid are really quiet too. While with a colleague which was getting her car out of parking he only noise I could hear was the strident "touting" noise the constructor added to the car. While going *forward* there was no noise at all. As pedestrian (and cyclist) ar

No, you're wrong. Our ears are a very good omni-directional object detection device. Make a two-ton hunk of moving metal silent, and I won't be able to detect it as well when it's behind me, or I visually just didn't see it (yes, it happens). My ears, on the other hand, will very quickly tell me that there's a loud two-ton hunk of moving metal making noise moving near me. And no, I don't wear any headphones or music devices while out walking/bicycling.

No, you see neither pedestrians nor drivers are expected to take responsibility for our own inattention. Instead, we must all take responsibility for each other. It's the American way. (Yes, mods, that last was sarcasm.)

You have a problem with idiots. Fine. I must submit, however, that the problems with quiet vehicles aren't the same issue (or the same people) at all.

People understand things in a context. If something is dangerous but quiet, they keep an eye on it. If something is dangerous only when it's making loud noises (commonly the case) then they come to depend on those noises to warn them of the danger. Now, something that has forever been in the latter c

The reason that I have trouble appreciating this perspective, but even more difficulty appreciating the `cars need to make noise so that attentive pedestrians can hear them coming and jump out of the way'... is that, where I live..., we have wildlife.
And I'm not talking about squirrels, or ducks, or armadillos; we have *deer* that will *really* jump out in front of cars--*on 65-MPH highways*. What's more, we have *moose* that do the same thing. And we, as drivers here, are expected to be able to avoid hit

The closest I've come to being hit by a car was in a parking-lot where some dude in a Prius was driving on the "wrong" side of the lane. I was walking into the lot on the left hand side, and then started to cross over, looked over my shoulder and a Prius was doing around 3x my speed a few paces behind me, and passed within a few feet of me. I'd been lifting my foot to step out before I noticed him, I couldn't hear it at all.Sure, this guy shouldn't have been coming up from behind me to pass going so much

It does highlight that his opinion really isn't worth any more than a regular person and the inclusion of his degree is unneeded. He's not a professor of anything relevant to the topic, and yet it's still mentioned in an attempt to lend more credibility to his statements.

Other people can do research too, you know. So long as they publish their results, and the professor of statistics who is part of the review process doesn't see any flaws in the math. You really don't need a "license to practice research". You will, however, only be taken seriously if your research makes sense - Spanish teacher or not.

What's most astonishing about this is that the linked article states that Larson's analysis has two problems. The only way I can figure you'd stop at two is that one and two are the only numbers you know. Or perhaps more astonishing is the fact that nowhere in this list of flaws did the author of the article see fit to point out that this is a completely meaningless analysis. Instead the author of this article, who obviously has even less experience analyzing and undertanding data than this Larson fellow, focused on two very peripheral and arbitrarily chosen points. If you want to see this kind of analysis done right, visit http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/ [venganza.org].

For the benefit of the exceptionally clueless, let me just point out that this article failed to mention the most obvious and devastating flaw with this kind of analysis -- the critical assumption that no other factor could possibly have influenced pedestrian fatalities since 2000.

Ah, I see. No wonder it's acceptable that the methodology is riddled with holes. The name of the site that publishes it seems to indicate that
FTA...

It concluded that hybrids like the Toyota Prius were involved in pedestrian crashes at a rate of 0.9 percent, half again as high as the 0.6 percent rate for gasoline vehicles. Hybrids were also twice as likely to have hit cyclists, at a rate of 0.6 percent versus 0.3 percent.

Okay, this is pretty clear - the original study.

But now EV enthusiast Mark Larson (he's also an Emeritus Professor of Spanish at Utah State University) has analyzed some additional data. He used 1994-2008 figures from the Fatality Reporting System maintained by the NHTSA.
If silent hybrid vehicles posed a threat to pedestrians, he reasoned, then the number of pedestrian deaths should have risen since 2000, when the first hybrids were sold. There are now roughly 1 million hybrid-electric vehicles among the 300 million on U.S. roads.
But in fact, despite increasing numbers of hybrids on the roads, the rate of pedestrian fatalities has in fact fallen over that same period.

Wait, what? There's kind of a gaping hole here folks...
But reading on shows that this objective and reputable news site has some doubts of their own as to Larson's methodology. Phew.

We like Larson's analysis,

Yeah, I'll just bet you do.

but we would observe that it has two problems.

Oh? Pray tell...

First, it doesn't factor in Vehicle Miles Traveled, which is correlated with a fall in accident deaths.

Okay, sure.

Second, Larson really only addresses half the issue. Fatalities from accidents are one data point, but injuries would be another--and are far more common than deaths.

Oh, yeah -- you nailed it exactly! Oh, wait - no, no you didn't. My bad, it was a typo -- I meant to write "you just completely ignored the glaring hole in the methodology applied by this professor of Spanish Studies". You can see how I made such a mistake, can't you? It could have happened to anyone.

Here it is, because I have to say it even though it's pretty flippin' obvious: In spite of the fact that OVERALL accidents are going down, the percentage of accidents caused by EVs is higher than non-EVs -- and when you consider that EVs still make up a very minor portion of the vehicles on the road, that's a pretty disturbing trend. Or how about the premise of his "report": The overall fatalities have decreased, and the number of EVs on the road has increased -- therefore EVs clearly do not pose any additional threat over their louder counterparts.

The lawyers hired by the family members of said (former) less attentive pedestrians will remove the greenbacks from the hybrid-drivers and hybrid manufacturers.

IOW: the less attentive, and those they put in charge, always have the last laugh, because they are larger in number

Natural Selection no longer stands on its own.
There's a new principle in play called the principal of affirmative action specifically in the form of the law of lawsuits, to help level the playing field and give the inattentive, le

The question you've got to ask yourself, then, is why the biggest supporters of communism and communist ideals seem to the the ones who have the most to lose if it were ever implemented earnestly. People with massive fortunes. Like George Soros, Warren buffet, etc.

Four of the five wealthiest members of congress voted for the health care redistribution bill.

The summary completely misses that the focus of the article is on blind pedestrians, but if you did RTFA you would know slow and attentive have little to do with the issue here (although the article mentions bicyclists, which I doubt is relevant to the blind pedestrian issue).

Specifically, cars running on electric power are quiet compared to a car running on gasoline, so hybrids and EVs have a safety flaw (however minor). Sure, I doubt you were entirely serious in your comment, but this is a serious issu

the article mentions bicyclists, which I doubt is relevant to the blind pedestrian issue

Not relevant to the blind pedestrian issue, but certainly relevant to the inattentiveness issue. My daily commute is about 10 minutes walk each way. In the last three years, I've never once been hit by a car (or even an EV) - but on three occasions I've been struck by cyclists who are ignoring red lights at clearly marked pedestrian crossings.